Institute for Economic and Social History at the Univ. of Vienna; Brooke Penaloza-Patzak and Tamara Fernando (Web)

Time: 29.06.-01.07.2023
Venue: Univ. Wien, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, „Green Lounge“

Programme (PDF)

Work on how material objects and collections are involved in the stabilization, transfer, loss, and transformation of knowledge has become one of the most dynamic spheres of inquiry in the history of science. This notwithstanding, conversation still tends to be overly determined by contemporary disciplinary boundaries and enlightenment-mode preoccupations about who and what constitutes science. There is a curious lack of discourse between scholars working on objects, specimens, and collections in what we now consider natural history and the natural sciences on one hand, and the human sciences on the other. And while research into the former is increasingly becoming a mainstay in the history of science, the latter is only still largely dismissed as the purview of anthropologists working on the history of their own discipline. These trends obscure vitally important information about how objects intertwine ideas and practices in different spheres of knowledge. The time is ripe to talk about how object-based practices and ideas figure into the history of knowledge in, and more emphatically between, the natural and human sciences broadly conceived.
This special issue brings historians of science focused on natural history, botany, ethnography, biogeography, environmental and social and economic history, together with scholars in archaeology, paleontology and cultural anthropology to talk about how objects, specimens, and collections have been involved in the transfer, loss, and transformation of specialized knowledge around the world from 1000 BCE to today.
Special areas of interest include but are not limited to the ways and means by which objects: Continue reading →

Keynote at the 2nd Annual Workshop of the Late Habsburg PhD Network (PDF)

Time: 22.06.2023, 18:00 Uhr
Ort: Univ. Wien, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna, Hörsaal 6 Franz König

The period after 1918 is often understood as a post-imperial or even post-colonial period in Habsburg Central Europe. The successor states drew sharp contrasts between their allegedly democratic and national values on the one hand, and the allegedly oppressive non-democratic and anti-national values of the empire they had replaced on the other. Research in the past decade has complicated this narrative in several ways. First, it has shown that imperial and national values often developed in tandem and shared a similar logic. Secondly, we now see that a range of continuities (institutional, administrative, cultural, personnel) linked the rejected imperial regime to the successor states. The lecture explores some of these continuities, examining the elements of imperial practice adopted by the successor states and pointing out where some new imperial practices distinguished the successors from the empire they replaced.

The Workshop’s Panels: Nationalism and Conflicts | Identity | Social and Cultural Aspects (PDF)

Pieter M. Judson is Professor of 19th and 20th Century History at the European University Institute in Florence. He has been awarded several prices for his publications, such as the Karl Vogelsang-Staatspreis in 2010. „The Habsburg Empire. A New History“ was published in 2016 and has since appeared in eleven translations. His research focuses on a variety of topics in the history of modern Europe including the history of empires, borderlands, nationalism, gender, cultural, and political history.

Institute for Banking and Financial History (IBF), the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, the House of Finance (HoF), and Women in Economic History (WIEH) (Web)

Time: 30.06.2023, 12.00-13.30 Uhr
Venue: Frankfurt a.M. and virtual space

It has become common in financial histories to refer to 19th century bankers with he/she pronouns. But rare is a woman that is identified as a banker in the literature. Is this because women bankers have been overlooked or are these 20th and 21st century pronouns of respect covering up the exclusionary misogyny of 19th century American finance?
This paper uses a variety of sources to discover if women of this era had anything beyond a minuscule role as managers, owners, employees or customers of financial institutions. Eugene N. White finds that only a handful of women managed banks and if they were employed it was usually in menial positions. But, they accounted for a third of the national bank shareholders, owning a quarter of the stock. Women only had a slightly larger presence on the frontier and at the federal regulatory agency (OCC), which slowly promoted them to more senior positions.

Moderation: Friederike Sattler, Women in Economic History (WIEH)

Eugene N. White is distinguished Professor of Economics at the Rutgers Univ. He currently helds the Visiting Professorship of Financial History at Goethe Univ.

The Zoom-link will be provided after registration. You can register here (Web)

Source: HSozuKult

Department of African Studies, Univ. of Vienna; Anais Angelo (Web)

Time: 06.–07.06.2024
Venue: Department of African Studies, Univ. of Vienna
Proposals by: 15.10.2023

As African countries became independent, being represented in state institutions was a political goal for many women, but undoing the legacy of colonial politics and gaining public visibility in the political field was no easy task. Despite serious difficulties and challenges, women vied for offices, campaigned, talked and wrote about politics, voted, and expressed their ideas within various institutions (organizations, political party, unions, local and national assemblies…). They were strategic actors in the processes of postcolonial state building. Yet, their history has remained confined to a separate section of African politics, the “women’s section”. While African political history has long been dominated by male actors, the history of African women in politics has been primarily written from the perspective of grassroots politics and women’s role in social and economic development projects. A new wave of scholarship has recently begun to address this discrepancy in the historiography, with scholars exploring the ways women have challenged established political orders “from the top”, from creative writing to frontal opposition to presidential rule. This literature shows that African women’s politics must be placed at the heart of narratives of state building, party politics, governance and presidential rule, that political narratives need to be complexified, concepts rethought, and that new sources must be sought to acknowledge African women’s complex modes of political imagination, action, and language.
Building on this trend, this conference aims to retrieve histories of African women’s contribution to the postcolonial politics of state building. Who were the women who vied for positions of power, how/why did they campaign (or were appointed), for which ideas? What did they achieve during their political mandates, which challenges did they face? What did they do afterwards, what impact did they have? Which sources are available to document their stories? What are the methodological challenges that emerge when retrieving these sources and/or writing these histories? Read more and source … (Web)